Wednesday, October 28, 2015

How Those Pakistanis Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Drones

A few days ago, I watched a video
of a remarkable debate between Intercept
journalist Glenn Greenwald and C. Christine Fair, Associate Professor of Peace and
Security Studies at Georgetown University, moderated by Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan.
I say “remarkable” because of the astonishing mental gymnastics Fair had to perform
in support of her argument that Pakistanis welcome being droned by America. The
debate was precipitated by a huge
Intercept report, based on documents
provided by a new, post-Snowden whistleblower, concluding that as many as nine out
of ten people killed in our drone strikes weren’t the intended targets.

Well, mistakenly killing nine people for every one you kill
on purpose might sound pretty bad, but Fair argued that actually it’s all
pretty good because: (i) Pakistanis who say they don’t like their country being
droned don’t count because they live in cities and are “cosmopolitan elites;” (ii)
all polls and other studies suggesting Pakistanis don’t like being droned are unreliable
because of various biases and methodological flaws; (iii) no one who believes that
droning Pakistan is counterproductive knows the country sufficiently well to have
a valid opinion; and (iv) we don’t know who’s been targeted and we don’t know who’s
been killed, but we do know the program is working (this last one is especially
puzzling, mostly in an internally contradictory kind of way).

Now, I admit I don’t know much about the region. I don’t speak
any of the languages, and I’ve never traveled there. I haven’t read the Koran—not
even a translation. So I’m clearly unburdened by the kind of erudition that seems
to be the source of Fair’s confidence in her opinion that Pakistanis actually like
it when America blows them up with sky robots.

What I do bring to the discussion, maybe, is some minimal insight
into human nature of the sort we novelists like to flatter ourselves into believing
is an important part of our work. And so, with no more than those embarrassingly
scant credentials as my basis and with an even more minimal claim to some
rudimentary common sense, I have to ask what’s probably a terribly un-nuanced and
unsophisticated question. Which is:

How likely is it that any group of humans anywhere would appreciate
a foreign power taking control of their skies and for years blowing up at will people
the foreign power adjudged undesirable?

For example, you might believe street crime is out of control
in America, or that a parasitical one percent is sucking the country dry, or that
neo-hippy or minority protesters have it all wrong and are ruining everything, or
that the Democrats are to blame for all the country’s ills, or that the problem
is in fact the Republicans. But no matter what you believe, you probably don’t wish
Russia or China or Iran or France or whoever would start patrolling the skies over
your neighborhood and blowing up whatever Americans are vexing you. And you’d probably
get a touch irate if one of those foreign countries went ahead and started up a
drone program in America anyway. You’d probably resent such a foreign program under
any circumstances, but if the program were blowing up nine people accidently for
every one it killed on purpose, including at weddings
and funerals,
you might get so resentful you’d find yourself invested in getting some payback.

So, being a somewhat simple man, I tend to figure that if I would
hate something (invasion, occupation, robot airplane assassination campaign,
that kind of thing) and react a certain way to it (by fighting back, for
example), probably other people would react the same way were the shoe on the other
foot. Even if they’re from faraway, exotically different countries—even countries
impossible to understand except by data-driven PhD-credentialed area experts who
have transcended the sorts of biases blinkering the benighted—I figure that our
common human nature will provide a decent roadmap to understanding their behavior.

It occurs to me there’s even a name for this concept: I think
I’ve heard it referred to as the Golden Rule. Or the Hillel the Elder version:
“What is hateful to you, don’t do to others.”

But maybe what those rules really mean is, “Unless they’re Pakistani,
because they’re different”? It could be that. I admit I’m one of those people who
doesn’t know Pakistan well enough to say for sure. Plus I’m biased and don’t
have good data.

And, in fairness to Fair and her learned, data-driven
theories that Pakistanis welcome being droned—that the experience even reminds
them of an uplifting story from the Koran!—it turns out there’s a long list of
other peoples who, as it happens, were untroubled by foreign-inflicted
violence and killing. So I am forced to acknowledge that Fair’s approach to
justifying western violence does have a long and colorful history.

But wait, there’s still more…

Yesterday, Fair followed up her debate points with a post in
the blog Lawfare. The additional points she made there are in their own way
as interesting as the ones she made in the debate itself, while also perhaps shedding
some light on how she’s able to maintain convictions about Pakistan that seem at
odds with basic tenets of human nature. And so, a few thoughts in response…

Glenn Greenwald has tirelessly
flogged the use of armed drones with Crusader-like conviction.

This
one I just thought was funny. Someone who’s against
bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim countries strikes Fair as some sort of Crusader?
Holy backward historical references, Batman!

I was equally confused as
to why the show was going to focus upon Pakistan, when the latest tranche of pilfered documents released by The Interceptpromises to detail “the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination
program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.”

We’ll
come back to Fair’s notion of “pilfered documents.” Here, I’m more interested in
the source of her confusion—apparently, the possibility that reactions in country
X to a foreigner-run robot airplane assassination program might offer clues about
reactions in country Y. Instead, Fair seems to cling to the notion that Pakistan
is sui generis, somehow existing apart
from aspects of human nature we can readily observe everywhere else.

The Intercepthas set up a secure drop box to facilitate government employees’ illegally providing classified
information to the organization.

Is
it just me, or is anyone else getting the feeling that Professor Fair really doesn’t
like leaks?

There’s
a lot to be said about a mindset like this one. First, it’s authoritarian. Second, it’s weird, focusing
as it does on the rare whistleblower rather than on rampant secrecy metastasis—akin
to complaining about the brief drizzle we just had here in the Bay Area while ignoring
the effects of a four-year drought. Third, it’s selective. Authoritarians like Fair
never use words like “pilfer” or “illegal” to describe the kinds of leaks that are
probably a thousand times more common than those of The Intercept’s new whistleblower: the ones offered up by insiders to
pet reporters to make the government look good. We’ll come back to that last point
in a second.

Mr. Greenwald and his associates
refer to these persons as “whistleblowers.”

(Also,
a parenthetical plea: can we eliminate the word “persons” from the lexicon,
except maybe when used ironically, and learn to love the standard plural
“people,” instead? We could then move on to “monies,” at which point we’d be on
a roll and people might start writing more the way they talk.)

Empirically, the documents
that have been leaked are riven with selection bias; leakers, driven by whatever
personal motives, often selectively leak specific documents.

You
have to be suffering from some pretty nuclear-grade selection bias of your own to
make this point about a whistleblower and not apply it to the thousands of government
officials who leak secrets in a way that’s favorable to the government (no illegal
pilfering there!) every. Single. Day.

In
fairness, the most invisible biases, and therefore the most dangerous, are
always the ones that affect ourselves. Which would explain how Fair is able to
simultaneously criticize other people for their alleged biases while turning an
apparent discussion of a Koran passage by host Mehdi Hasan—something
about unbelievers being unintelligent cattle—into an approving “cite.” It sounded like bullshit
even before I looked closer. It was. Watch the video yourself. At their impressive best, Hasan’s remarks are
laudable—who would argue that anyone should cede the moral high ground? At their
occasional worst, they come across as the Islamic equivalent of neo-Atheist
self flattery, or American exceptionalism or other nationalism. If Fair’s aside
wasn’t a deliberate smear, it could only have been the result of intellectually
crippling bias—the kind she readily perceives in everyone who doesn’t agree
with her.

Consumers of these documents
have no idea of how representative this sample is of all information that exists
about the drone program. There are most certainly classified reports that positively
describe the program’s utilization in specific theatres, but these documents have
not apparently been leaked.

True,
if by “have not apparently been leaked” Fair means to exclude New York Times articles like this one:

Drone Strikes on Al Qaeda Are Said to Take Toll on Leadership in
Pakistan

LONDON — Revelations of new high-level
losses among Al Qaeda‘s top leadership in Pakistan‘s tribal belt have underscored
how years of American drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group’s
upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive
offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

While the C.I.A.drone strike that killed two Western hostages
has led to intense criticism of the drone program and potentially to a reassessment
of it, the American successes over the years in targeting and killing senior Qaeda
operatives in their home base have left the militant group’s leadership facing difficult
choices, counterterrorism officials and analysts say.

And
hey, guess what those anonymous counterterrorism officials were doing? They
were leaking—AKA pilfering and illegally providing classified information to the
media.

But
they sure weren’t whistleblowing. Maybe this is why Fair hasn’t noticed.

In fact, given Mr. Greenwald’s
evangelical zeal against the various uses of drones, I doubt that if the organization
received such reports, it would publish them.

Why
would it bother? For the publication of self-interested, government-revering leaks,
we already have the New York Times and
many other access-journalism addicts consistently happy to violate their own rules on the use of
anonymous sources to curry favor with the powerful. Fair acts as though the
government doesn’t already leak like a ruptured colostomy bag when doing so serves
its own interest. The government does so constantly and pervasively, and suggesting
that an investigative outfit like The Intercept
should provide the government yet more assistance in promoting self-interested leaks
is at best bizarre.

And if it did publish such
exculpatory documents, would The Intercept’s writers simply dismiss them as “rank propaganda”?

Only
if they wanted to accurately characterize government leaks justifying government
programs, I imagine.

Second, these leakers are
always anonymous, for obvious reasons: they do not want to be prosecuted for breaking
the law. However, anonymous sources cannot be vetted for the sagacity of their interpretation
or for their motives…Obviously, someone who is breaking the law to provide these
documents must be presumed to be completely honest and factually correct in his
assessments. [I think that last part is sarcasm]

I
don’t want to belabor this point, but…again, government-serving leaks are probably
a thousand times more common than government-critical ones. Fair is applying her
principle to the .1% of critical leakers while giving a pass to the 99.9% wink-and-nod
variety. The selective concern would be strange under any circumstances. That
she manages to do it while lecturing others on the dangers of bias is stunning.

In its most recent product,
“The Drone Papers,” The Intercepttells readers that the leaker was moved by his moral outrage. But
is it not possible that less noble motivations compelled the leaker to provide these
particular documents? If the motive was espionage or work-place dissatisfaction,
does that change our perception of the documents and the leaker’s explanation of
them?

For
someone ordinarily so quick to dismiss everything that isn’t “data,” Fair’s pivot
here to the mushy realms of the workings of the human heart is deft enough to make
a novelist blush.

Sure,
we should always factor in what we can know of a person’s motives (which often isn’t
much). Which is why the government worked so hard (and ultimately unsuccessfully)
to brand Snowden as a narcissist. What’s really odd, though, isn’t that people who
hate whisteblowers always try to impugn their motives. It’s that such people never
question the motives of the countless officials whose leaks amplify the government’s
preferred narrative.

So
if you leak to challenge power, there must be something nefarious going on. If
you leak to burnish power, you’re just doing God’s work.

Nope,
no bias there.

A third problem is the presumption
that classification confers some standard of quality.

I
see none of this in The Intercept’s reporting
and can only surmise that Fair is either projecting or trying to set up a straw
man. Pretty obviously, the point isn’t that secret documents are some kind of holy
scripture, but rather that the documents in question are ones the government itself
relies on, and as such are noteworthy regardless of their underlying “standard
of quality.”

In my experience, classified
products are rarely worth the effort to obtain and read.

Which
might make one wonder why Fair is so upset about the pilfering and illegality
and all that.

I find myself wondering a bit about someone whose attempt at
exculpation is, “Hey, the person we accidentally blew up wasn’t ‘innocent!’” It
seems maybe a bit like saying, “Hey, that guy we executed for a murder he didn’t
commit? Well, turns out he might have had a couple outstanding parking tickets.
Dude had it coming to him!”

Luckily, I secretly love when life imitates art, because
this all reminded me of Agent Rogersz from Repo
Man, responding to concerns about an innocent man being tortured by declaring,
“No one is innocent!”

With respect to Pakistan,
there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put
forward by Mr. Greenwald…Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which
inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started
in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.

Leave
aside whether “We don’t accidentally kill as many people as you claim” can best
be characterized as “the exact opposite conclusion.” Apparently the really catastrophically
disastrous strikes don’t have catastrophically disastrous effects. In fact, catastrophically
disastrous strikes shouldn’t be counted at all. And, once we’ve magically
gerrymandered out those catastrophically disastrous strikes, we can explainaway a dozenstudies, polls, and informed commentary (and this one, too) and focus only on the
one report we like, citing it for the counterintuitive proposition that Pakistanis
welcome a drone assassination program that mistakenly kills only one innocent (whoops,
I mean non-targeted) Pakistani out of ten and that the program is working as advertised.

Mr. Greenwald also cited the
opinions of well-regarded generals such as General Stanley McChrystal, the former
commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan [“The resentment created by US drones
is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral
level”]. Mr. Hasan also cited the views of retired U.S. Lt. General
Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [“Even when
it works, even when we take out a big name, it makes us all feel good for 24 hours.
And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It just makes them a martyr, they get replaced,
it just creates a new reason for all of them to fight us harder”]… it should be emphasized that the opinions offered by any generals,
unless supported by data and rigorous analysis, are simply opinions.

Fair also claimed during the debate that “He [General Flynn]
doesn’t have data. He has no data.”

I just want to say that I hope the guy who used to run the DIA
had access to some data. You’d generally want heads of the DIA and other such
massive intelligence bureaucracies to stumble across a little data from time to
time as they’re formulating their opinions. Otherwise our tax dollars are being
wasted even more than I suspected.

As for McChrystal, during the debate he had the honor (along
with investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the drones-and-related
topics book Dirty Wars: The War is a Battlefield
and subject of an accompanying Oscar-nominated
film of the same name) of being one of the many people Fair claimed “actually
doesn’t know Pakistan.” Someone better tell that to McChrystal, because he seems
to have written a
whole book on the topic, a topic he probably had a hard time avoiding during
his time as the commander of US and NATO forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

By the way, another data-challenged person ignorant of all things
Pakistani who might have come up but didn’t was Admiral Dennis Blair, former Director
of National Intelligence, who
claims drone strikes are “the politically advantageous thing to do—low cost, no US casualties,
gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular
only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows
up over the long term.”

Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Hasan
also asserted vigorously that drones make more terrorists than they kill. To support
this claim, Mr. Greenwald cited the opinions of several well-known persons. First,
he cited Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl whom the Pakistani Taliban shot for
her promotion of female education…Ms. Yousafzai is a courageous young woman. She
is not, however, representative of Pakistani thought…She’s also no expert on the
matter at hand, her good intentions notwithstanding. Leaving aside her personal
tragedy and perseverance, Ms. Yousafzai lived in Malakand, not in the tribal areas
where drones exclusively operate…

It’s
a little surreal to listen to a white chick from Georgetown explain how an actual
Pakistani’s views on drones don’t count because the Pakistani isn’t representative
of Pakistani thought, isn’t an expert, and didn’t live in the right part of Pakistan.
But it is consistent with Fair’s overall theme that everyone who disagrees with
her—NGOs, army generals, ex-heads of intelligence agencies, the British government,
Pew polling, various actual Pakistanis—knows Pakistan so little, is so
deprived of meaningful data, or is so crippled by bias, that they can’t understand
the unique Pakistani appreciation of being
droned by a foreign power.

There was also some discussion during the debate about whether—law
and morality aside—drone strikes are ever effective. I want to say just one thing
about this. Which is:

Of course drones sometimes take out an intended target. But then,
so do chemical weapons. So do nukes. So would a flamethrower, if you deployed one
against a house fly. “Effective” in this context is as misleading as the question
of whether “torture
ever works.” Anything can “work,” anything can be declared effective, if you
exclude every side effect and other cost from your calculations. But destabilizing
a nuclear-armed country and turning material numbers of its population into militants
in order to kill a few fungible individuals might on balance be considered an odd
definition of “effective.” It might even be considered insane.

Beyond which, as Greenwald himself points out during the debate,
we’ve been waging a global war against terrorism for over fourteen years now and
there’s no sign anything is getting better—in fact, every western government says
things are getting worse. All of which even without more should make claims of drone
“effectiveness” somewhat suspect.

I knew it [the debate] had
aired only when Mr. Greenwald’s legion of acolytes began trolling me on Twitter
with the familiar litany of often-misogynist rants.

Strangely enough, I think the key to Fair’s inability to understand
that people don’t like being bombed by foreigners is contained in that one short
sentence.

First, though, I want to congratulate Greenwald on having acquired
a legion of acolytes. As someone who can legitimately lay claim only to a small
cadre of people I sometimes flatter myself to think of as “fans” and no acolytes
at all that I know of, I am humbled—and a little envious. I’m disappointed, though,
that Fair missed the alliterative possibilities in something like Legion of Lackies.
Well, maybe she’ll write another Lawfare post.

Anyway, I didn’t see the tweets in question, but I spend a decent
amount of time on Twitter and so have no trouble believing that various people addressed
Fair in demeaning, belittling, insulting ways, some of them misogynist. No doubt,
there’s a lot of ugliness on the Internet.

Yet in her own tweets, Fair has taken to calling Greenwald “GeeGee.”
There are too many to link to; if you’re curious, just search for it on her Twitter page.

Calling someone named Glenn Greenwald something like GG on
Twitter could be easily explained as a way of saving scarce characters. But “GeeGee”?
Come on. Everyone knows that conferring a nickname on a stranger—especially any
kind of diminutive—is inherently insulting, and there’s no question that in resorting
to this embarrassingly childish behavior, Fair is trying to insult Greenwald.

What’s so revealing here is that Fair knows she herself doesn’t
like being insulted (unless she’s that rare individual who welcomes litanies of
misogynist rants). And yet she seems incapable of what should be only the smallest
of imaginative leaps: if she doesn’t like being insulted, probably other people
don’t like being insulted, either. If she doesn’t think people should do it to
her, probably she shouldn’t do it to other people. That Golden Rule thing
again.

And though it’s a trivial instance of the phenomenon, the broad
dynamics are similar: this is the same person who must know she would hate it if
a foreign power started droning her neighborhood—but who can’t imagine
that other peoples might feel the same way she would.

Sad to see so much learning get in the way of something so obvious.
Sadder still to know how many people have to suffer and die because of intellectual
and imaginative occlusions like Fair’s.

10 comments:

I watched the debate, and took some small part (sans mysogynism) on Fair's Twitter feed asking her much the same things you point out in your article, to no avail. She would not even answer question that tried to seriously address her position. She seems much more interested in killing messengers than in addressing such questions as "you have no real data (proof) that drones actually kill the 'right' people, yet you claim they do - isn't that a double standard?" etc.

In the end this all leaves me thinking that if this type of disassociative thinking and subsequent 'actionable intelligence' is what an educated academic can openly espouse as proof in order to 'get things done' on behalf of the War on Terror, then it's likely to be a watered down version of the 'reality' that is crafted behind closed doors on behalf of the American citizens.

Given that, it's no wonder that our efforts have been a demonstrably abysmal failure.

Disclaimer: I'm a Pakistani, one who Christine Fair is probably referring to as the "cosmopolitan elite", and she's probably not wrong in calling me that.

I've followed her work on Pakistan for years now, over half a decade. There was a time when she did some pretty decent work on Pakistan and has taken time to try and understand the country, but she's always had her biases. Which is fine, everyone does, there's generally no harm unless it really starts affecting your work. Which in my opinion it has done over the past few years.

I've also engaged her (and a few of her acolytes: foreign journalists, foreign 'experts' who cover or write about Pakistan) numerous times on Twitter regarding drones and other subjects.

A. What she refers to as the cosmopolitan elite in her criticism are often just that, but what she doesn't mention is that a lot of those cosmopolitan elites are themselves scholars, journalists, academics and 'experts' on many subjects. I myself am a journalist. This a group that she entirely dismisses as the "cosmopolitan elite" when in fact they also happen to be members of the so-called intelligentsia. But of course, obviously her opinions and writings are more valid than those of us who were raised here, have worked here, and have also opinions on the matter. Of course the data that we cite is the wrong data, because there is no way that we Pakistanis could ever be intellectually honest. That would just be crazy.

B. She is extremely rude and abusive on Twitter to the point where I have made an active point of not engaging with her because it's impossible to have a discussion without her making assumptions about my motives or biases; all this without actually addressing the issue raised. A bit rich of her to talk about people being abusive on Twitter to her, which many of them are, but she's just as crass as most of the misogynistic filth she has to deal with from Pakistanis and the like.

C. It's very convenient for her to cite things like "people we've spoken to say they prefer drones or they think they're effective" but then she doesn't apply the same academic rigor to their statements. The people she speaks to could not conceivably have their own agendas, only the people in the polls she doesn't agree with have agendas.

D. The way she treats Pakistan and Pakistanis is orientalist and mildly racist. The notion that Pakistani opinions on these subjects aren't valid compared to hers, the white PhD who could swoop into our country and understand it better than us, is orientalist and absolutely ridiculous. At best it's arrogant, at worst it's racist.

Anyway just a few points I wanted to make as a Pakistani who has followed her work and endured the hypocrisy that she passes off as scholarship and expert opinion. You've covered basically everything here and done a fine job. Thanks for writing it. Obviously if a Pakistani wrote something like this it might just be dismissed as 'cosmopolitan elite' which immediately translates into useless and out of touch. Funny, I don't remember Christine Fair either living or visiting the tribal regions very much. Malala on the other hand, lived very close, and lived under Taliban rule. How ridiculous of Malala to claim that she can have an opinion on the matter.

One problem I see here is that the show on Al Jazeera featured no Pakistanis even though the debate ended up being quite Pakistan-centric. Which is predictable considering the extensive drone program in Pakistan. Why is it that Christine Fair or Glenn Greenwald should speak for us. They can both be on the program but at least bring one Yemeni, Somali or Pakistani on air to provide a bit of more credibility to the discussion. GG did a decent job but there wasn't really any need to quote Malala, there are far more people that you can quote then her, and it just gave Christine Fair another opportunity to dismiss/rubbish a source. We need more Pakistani voices and other local voices in the discourse about drones. It's irresponsible journalism to not give a greater voice to the people whose country is actually at the heart of the question.

Another thing that CF often is heard saying, and also said it but it was slightly inaudible in the program was, "why does the Pakistan army then allow it"?

This is a better question to ask, but Fair won't give you the full answer. She'll tell us that it's simply because the drone program is effective and therefore the Pakistani army allows it. There is some truth in that but it is not the whole truth.

The full truth is that the Pakistani army allows it because it deflects the heat off the Pakistan army. The civilian government gets the heat for the sovereignty issue. The drone program means the Pakistan army doesn't have to go after those target themselves, which will inevitably cause civilian casualties (which the drones cause as well), and as a result the army can wash their hands of any responsibility. It is counter productive because it allows the Pakistan army to not take responsibility for the war on militancy themselves. CF's question about the army is actually a point about the efficacy of drone programs and it contradicts her view that the drone program works. My contention is that the drone program doesn't work because it allows the pakistan army to take a backseat, when it should actually be in the drivers seat in the fight against islamic extremism. Only the Pakistan army and the government can solve the problem in the tribal areas, the drone program just complicates matters politically and militarily.

Thank you Glenn Greenwald and Barry Eisler! Politically powerful industries use a very effective, comprehensive and pathological strategy to avoid liability and criminal charges while making the most money in the shortest amount of time. Christine Fair is a knowing, immoral shill. The deception and manipulation she utilizes are legal yet this word has lost all meaning in the face of such reprehensible outcomes. Millions die and the earth is irreversibly destroyed all while the ultimate organized crime syndicate thrives. Revealing the truth is such a threat to these criminals that they will go to extraordinary lengths to conceal it. Therein lies HOPE for humanity and the very survival of our planet.

Thank you for this brilliant brick by brick demolition of Ms. Fair's fantasies. You have done something many of us in Pakistan feel strongly about but can not express as eloquently as you have. The only expertise Ms. Fair has is in the use of expletives in Urdu which she uses quite generously in her tweets. Her ire seems to stem, partly at least, from her being declared persona non grata. A genuine scholar would never let such trivialities colour her opinions while she has gone to the extent of trying to goad the present Indian government to nuke Pakistan! Need one say more to show her bias?

Imagine if what Christine Fair is claiming were true - that Pakistanis welcome being droned by America (your words). In the best possible case it would be like this: a) these drones would kill only their intended targets with zero collateral deaths andb) the targets would be guilty of a capital punishment-worthy crime andc) the community would dislike the targets to the point of wanting them to experience a violent death andd) these same targets would be hated by the *entire* community around them (not just the majority) ande) the muslim locals would have no problems with a non-muslim nation from halfway across the globe meting out lethal justice on their sovereign soil andf) the people living there would be ok with being under constant 24-hour surveillance by killer sky robots andg) they would not go insane from hearing random explosions from supersonic rockets being fired at various buildings near where they live and work.

For her position to be correct, all seven things would have to be true. Keeping aside the fact that none of them are, the people living under these drones would still have a whole bunch of shit to deal with in the aftermath (immediate and long term) of an attack. So according to Ms. Fair the cost dealing with this shit would have to be less than the cost of continued existence of these targets (America's enemies) within their community.

The manufacturer uses the adjective "precision" to describe the munitions used by drones but if you've ever seen any videos of them in action their blast radius is quite large. I think their intended use was for anti-armour combat and not anti-personnel operations. But like the the old saying goes, if you've only got a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

So when one of these missiles gets used, the locals end up having to deal with the following: breathing toxic smoke from burning rocket fuel and buildings, damage to infrastructure (public and private), the strain on emergency resources (fire, paramedics, hospitals, medicine), disposing of unexploded munitions, rebuilding costs, disruption to daily life (I'm probably missing some - will their taxes go up as a result of these attacks? Property value go down?).

I mean, is there a single person on this planet who would not be incensed after having experienced just the secondary crap surrounding these drone attacks? I cannot believe that Christine Fair actually believes what she writes.

I simply want to say thanks (to Barry and the "persons" who have engaged in the comments) for continuing to fight the good fight. Your open discourse helps grind away my apathy. And when the depth of hypocrisy threatens to immobilize me, your drive to bring these topics to the fore gives me a little hope.

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There are a lot of terrific blogs out there on the world of writing, but Heart of the Matter isn't one of them. HOTM primarily covers politics, language as it influences politics, and politics as an exercise in branding and marketing, with the occasional post on some miscellaneous subject that catches my attention.

HOTM has a comments section. Sounds simple enough, but as even a cursory glance at the comments of most political blogs will show, many people would benefit from some guidelines. Here are a few I hope will help.

1. The most important guideline when it comes to argument is the golden rule. If someone were addressing your point, what tone, what overall approach would you find persuasive and want her to use? Whatever that is, do it yourself. If you find this simple guideline difficult, I'll explain it slightly differently in #2.

2. Argue for persuasion, not masturbation. If you follow the golden rule above, it's because you're trying to persuade someone. If you instead choose sarcasm and other insults, you can't be trying to persuade (have you ever seen someone's opinion changed by an insult?). If you're not trying to persuade, what you're doing instead is stroking yourself. Now, stroking yourself is fine in private, but I think we can all agree it's a pretty pathetic to do so in public. So unless you like to come across as pathetic, argue to persuade.

3. Compared to the two above, this is just commentary, but: no one cares about your opinion (or mine, for that matter). It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument. Think about it: when was the last time someone persuaded you of the rightness of his opinion just by declaring what it was? Probably it was the same time someone changed your mind with an insult, right? And like insults, naked declarations of opinion, because they can't persuade, are fundamentally masturbatory. And masturbation, again, is not a very polite thing to do on a blog.

Argue with others the way you'd like them to argue with you. Argue with intent to persuade. Argue with evidence and logic. That shouldn't be so hard, should it? Let's give it a try.